By Craig Gilbert

Interviewed shortly after his speech at CPAC Thursday in Washington, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson was mildly self-critical about his delivery (he lost his thread for a several beats at one point), but said speaking out, both locally and nationally, about the debt and deficits was an important job for him.

“It’s what I have to do. I realize that. I do have to get better at it,” said Johnson, who read from a text, not a teleprompter. “If we’re going to solve the fiscal crisis of this nation, you have to have people that are serious about doing it and you have to have those people willing to communicate how serious the situation is. I’m hoping there’s a lot of us. I’m hoping there’s a lot of us that can be effective about it. And that we come up with the powerful anecdotal pieces of information that will convince the American public just what we have to do.”

In his speech, Johnson said he was “afraid that too many Americans are willing to keep their heads in the sand and refuse to face the reality” of the nation’s debt.

In the interview, Johnson said: “Who wants to hear bad news? When you’ve got people within the political parties not seriously addressing this or saying, ‘Oh, it’ll be okay. This is America! We’ll take care of this! We don’t have to cut anything.' I’m afraid people are actually going to listen to that, and I don’t think it’s true.”

Johnson said he is prepared to vote against raising the federal debt ceiling in the coming weeks unless it is linked to what he calls “hard spending constraints” such as an overall cap on federal spending as a share of GDP.

“I’ve got an open mind in terms of what form and shape that’s going to take. Things that will straight-jacket politicians here and force the prioritization of spending -- give politicians the cover they need to actually cut spending,” said Johnson.

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